23 May

In J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel, Concrete Island, the author writes of an architect marooned on traffic island beneath the M4 following a tire blowout. Describing the crash which leaves the protagonist stranded, Ballard writes, “the sequence of violent events only micro-seconds in duration had opened and closed behind him like a vent of hell.” A Growing Sickness, the latest extended play from Brooklyn NYC’s Veikur, unquestionably served as the soundtrack to that fleeting moment of stupor. Though comprised of three distinct tracks of contemporary musique concréte, the work is best approached in toto. From the disinterested guitar strums, metallic scrapes, and deeply buried keyboard passages of “Suspicions,” to the urban sounds and stolid metronome-like clicks of “The Greatest Horrors Hide in the Light,” the EP forms a sonic tableau of modernity’s underbelly. The groggy 8 minute closer, “The Age of Infection,” brimming with subliminal dispatches, recalls a sulking Aaron Dilloway trying to play the Dead C’s Tusk, sans instruments. As the global political situation grows increasingly bleak, one begins to suspect that the human race’s own impending blowout is just around the bend. It would do well to keep Veikur cued up for the crash and fall that follows. Topical, unsettling, mesmerizing, and not near long enough.